A conversation with Tenant of Culture
Deadstock (Series), Tenant of Culture, 2018
To begin to decode the semiotics of fashion is like unlocking a treasure trove. As we journey through time and space, our bodies clothed in the garments we have chosen for that particular day ahead, or a specific event, can be tethered to many internal and external factors. Practical, emotional, psychological, cultural, or societal, the signs and symbols embedded within the fabrics, that shroud our form, give clues about us that far surpass any other everyday practice we engage in.
This week I spoke with Hendrickje Schimmel, an artist who works under the moniker Tenant of Culture. Hendrickje takes garments that have been shed by the fashion system, or the consumer, and uses this deadstock or secondhand clothing to craft sculptural assemblages. In these works, she deconstructs the trends they were once associated with, placing them within a historical context. They metaphorically act as a mirror, reflecting ourselves and the society of which we are a part. When looking at her work, our identity and sense of self, it seems, is as fragile as the seams which were once sewn to hold the scraps of fabric together. The act of deconstruction and reconstruction draws attention to the labor, the hands that made these mass-produced garments, in an attempt to demythologize the staging of “new” fashion or fashions.
Hendrickje told me that ideas come from walking through central London, along Oxford Street, Bond Street, and Regent Street. The enticing window displays, merchandising new trends, act as markers of fashionability—presenting the milkmaid trend or ornamental survivalism. When these objects enter the secondhand market, Hendrickje begins to take an interest, just when the trend is no longer at its most persuasive. She takes them apart, physically tracing their contours and threads while researching their socio-political histories—a heady combination. While talking I was filled with nostalgia for the electricity I felt when I discovered at eighteen-years-old that fashion could be explored historically and theoretically. I loved spending an hour with Hendrickje, as we searched around for breadcrumbs of meaning to be analyzed.
Shonagh Marshall: I wanted to start by asking why you chose to use the name Tenant of Culture?
Hendrickje Schimmel: It came from the writings of Michel de Certeau, who's a cultural historian and philosopher. I was reading his book, The Practice of Everyday Life. He repeatedly uses the term tenant as an allegory for renting within a larger pre-existing structure, like a post ownership approach to culture, which I found interesting. Especially because I work with second-hand materials, I don't start from scratch; I position myself more within the existing materials. It also refers to fashion, where larger brands often use “maison” in front of their brand name, or atelier. The name implies the traditional fashion house, but it becomes more transient than a permanent structure when replacing the word “house” with “tenant.” It also represents a notion of flexibility for me because I work within a fashion and art context. The idea of working as an autonomous artist, under my name, didn't appeal to me. I think what I like about fashion is that it's an everyday practice. You rely on sources outside of your control.
Preserved Style (Series), Tenant of Culture, 2016
Shonagh: I find it incredibly exciting speaking with you because you seamlessly talk, in an accessible way, about how history and theory are embedded in your practice and you use it to question and critically evaluate the fashion system. You have just made a book called Tenant of Culture published by Soft Opening and Charles Asprey. Within the book, there is scholarly text by curator and cultural critic Jeppe Ugelvig. Why did you think it was essential to commission this piece of writing?
Hendrickje: Theory is important in my practice. Fashion might appear as frivolous, but it isn't—there's so much to say about it. It goes so much further than what you learn when you read about the surface of things, a fresh fashion trend, or how you should wear something. I think that kind of writing and discussion has a right to exist out there because it's appealing to many people. But I've always been very interested in the dynamics behind the creation of trends and how fashion works. Studying fashion, you don't get an opportunity to study that very much, so I did a lot of my own research and constructed my own rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of fashion. In my work I alter between the theoretical framework of fashion and the more practical aspects of garment making and technique.
Jeppe and I met when I graduated from the Royal College of Art, and we started to do some writing together and share some text. So it felt natural to ask him to reflect upon those years of practice. It's crucial to me, and Jeppe says this in the book, to create a comprehensive theory of waste within fashion because the narrative surrounding waste in fashion is very one dimensional. Just like sustainability is a very one-dimensional dialogue within contemporary fashion production and mass production. The danger is if you keep that one-dimensionality, it becomes a trend and becomes something very fleeting. It's essential to look at waste within fashion and consumption from various standpoints. Rather than saying, "oh, this is waste, this is consumerism, look at this huge pile of waste. It's so bad." It is important to dig a bit deeper to see how this dynamic of wastefulness is embedded within so many aspects of consumerism, and not only in fashion production. Mechanisms of waste production have become a vital aspect of the way we think, live and consume. This has been examined largely for example in psychoanalysis. I thought it would be interesting to apply that to fashion. The rest of the book is extremely visual. It's very colorful; there are lots of detail shots. It's almost like going through a list of materials. So I think the text and the images balance each other out quite well.
Shonagh: Asking people to engage on a more theoretical level with something like fashion, that they're engaging in daily, is powerful. There's an expectation often with contemporary culture and mass media to assume that everything needs to be very digestible. In the essay, Jeppe asks in response to increased current consumption "what may be the position of the artist here—a figure who, at least historically, has made it a critical practice to reflect society onto itself via its detritus, but who also embodies capitalism's undying search for new methods of production, both materially and stylistically?" Is this something that you can answer?
Hendrickje: It's extremely hard to articulate what my role is within a specific genre because the essence of my practice is interdisciplinary. That's what I articulated with the idea of Tenant of Culture and it being transient within both art and fashion; they're kind of interchangeable for me. I use garments as my primary material, but then I show the work in an art context, because there you have more space and time for reflection, and you don't have to bump out collection after collection. None of them are ideal constructions. That's why I sample a bit of that and a bit of this. Workshops are also an important element of my practice, to reconnect with people more directly and physically, which is now impossible, unfortunately. I like not to be able to be fitted within one subcategory because it's quite restrictive. A lot of my work is wearable, but a lot of it isn't either. With fashion, you're drawn in easier. It's almost like you're getting people over the threshold to engage with different aspects of the theoretical discourse behind the scenes. It is interesting as soon as you apply a different methodology to garment making by looking at clothing more reflectively; it is immediately considered fine art because because that is traditionally regarded as the more reflective practice. I don't think that should be the case; I don't need to say that I'm a fine artist because that has more intellectual connotations. I think fashion in its own right is very intellectual. I never want to denounce the fashion aspect of my work.
Shonagh: You work solely with garments and accessories that have had a former life. You have said that you see recycling as a form of activism. Do you still think this?
Hendrickje: I think I would now probably be a bit more cautious using the word activism because its meaning shifts and changes so much. It's a term in flux at the moment. Recycling has many connotations, just as waste does, a post-apocalyptic aesthetic, or it is seen as a marker of resourcefulness. For me, it's incredibly normal, it's so normal to reuse, it's so normal to restore clothes, and it should be normalized. By engaging with that more, you can change consumer behavior, one of the only tools we have. It's interesting that many people visually immediately connect something fragmented, that looks like it has been made out of something that has been worn or thrown away, is a bit ragged or restored, with a post-apocalyptic aesthetic, which illustrates that there is not enough existing and accessible discourse surrounding re-use, that doesn't immediately pigeonhole it. It just illustrates how normalized newness is. Older things are either a fetish-like object or exist in the nostalgia sphere, or they're post-apocalyptic. It isn't a normal thing to recycle or restore your clothes, and I think it's imperative to work hard on normalizing that phenomenon.
Country Styles for the Young (Series), Tenant of Culture, 2020
Shonagh: I am interested in picking up on what you said about "newness." Fashion Revolution's tagline is "Who made your clothes?" They do this so that the brand will engage in transparency in the supply chain, but I think about what something "new" actually means. This clothing item has touched many hands and has been in many different containers and countries before it reaches the consumer. The garment has had a life beyond its one in the retail store, presented to the consumer. In your work, you aim to draw attention to industrial production within fashion; why is that important to you?
Hendrickje: My frustration comes from the lack of information about garment production, the fragmentary nature of the fashion production cycle, the assembly line, and, as you say, the life cycle before it ended up in retail stores. I think fashion's business is to make that untransparent; all you see is the garment's staging element. A narrative created by the PR agency and merchandisers, this jacket belongs to the subject of chic hiking; for example, it is forced into that narrative. But once you extract the garment from that narrative, it becomes not new anymore because it's outside of the context when you bought it. This abstraction happens when you purchase something with this very strong visual merchandising; it fades into something you didn't realize you were buying into.
I say this from my own experience. I get very enthusiastic about a trend. I love it. I think about how it would fit me and how I would style it with other items I have, but you grow tired of the garment as soon as it's in your wardrobe. I don't think anyone lives without some attachment to lifestyle objects but I am interested in the process of what you call in marketing strategy terms 'Psychological obsolescence' which is when a newly bought commodity is created in such a trendy style that the owner gets sick of it faster. This process is so conspicuous, yet; it's tough to address it because the whole strategy behind it is so fragmented, nobody's responsible for how it got there. From the designer, to where the commodity is created, to where it's assembled, to where it is sold, all the way through to when it is thrown away. It's impossible to get any information. The attempt is futile because you can't see where it came from just by the fabric. My work is an embodied way to create an understanding of the full cycle; how something is created, assembled, produced, commissioned, branded, sold and then psychologically obsolete but physically waste.
I'm working with workwear now because that's a trend that I'm quite interested in, the humble workwear aesthetic. I bought loads of second-hand overalls. When you start to take them apart, you realize how resistant they are. There are three stitches over every stitch; there are waterproof edges; all these things that actually make it hard-wearing. I never realized how a hard-wearing piece was assembled. By deconstructing it and finding a lot of resistance within the material, I'm learning things about the material and about the garment that I couldn't have looked up in a book, for example. But if you take apart a white plimsoll, cheap from Primark, for instance, you can rip it apart, and it's done. This kind of resistance of material becomes an essential, non-theoretical aspect of assembling the work. It is a part of the research that you can only do with your hands, time, and a knife. It's an interesting method for me.
Shonagh: I'm so enraptured listening to you talk about trends. Can you tell me more about why you are drawn to them?
Hendrickje: I'm specifically interested in trends that have been pushed heavily through visual merchandising. I'm not too interested in trend reports or what the future of fashion is going to be. I'm more interested in looking backward. I look at all the bygone trends and styles that have already passed and its items have been discarded. I often compare it with the digestive process, it seems as if all these visual phenomena haven’t quite disintegrated to the point where they can truly disappear. It is the ghostly aspect of branding, the constructed stories that haunt the secondary market. That is also the material that is very accessible to me. Everything that is now on eBay or in charity shops is very recent history, and I find that the most interesting. It is the in-between stage of something becoming history, but it is also not quite what is going on now. I take those garments and look at them and try to place them in a historical context. There is a repetition of things, like an interest in sustainability. There is an almost cyclical repetition throughout fashion history. Once you place something within a historical narrative, it starts to speak differently.
Works and Days (Series), Tenant of Culture, 2018
Shonagh: In the essay, in your book, Jeppe makes an interesting connection between the ragpicker, the historical figure, and yourself. Could you tell me a bit more about this, especially in the context of Walter Benjamin?
Hendrickje: Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin was a critical book when I constructed the outlines of Tenant of Culture. It gave me some freedom within the idea that you can work in a fragmentary way, and that there's as much value in things that aren't a linear story as there is, within a more pronounced or articulated practice. Especially coming from a fashion background where you have to construct an artificial narrative, it's so important to have this storytelling element in branding. I felt so repulsed by the idea of creating a narrative that was wholly constructed and artificial. I like how Benjamin refuses to assemble a story in the sense of something coherent. At that point, I found that quite radical. It's also connected to the idea of working with discarded materials, debris, and waste, which is virtually always fragmented because it is loose of its original context and the question of origin and endpoints becomes less important. For Benjamin, the ragpicker is an allegorical figure. The metaphorical ragpicker of history serves the function of looking at what didn't make it into the institutional archives. Everything that has become waste is where it extracts its stories, rather than just the stories told within mainstream culture, archives, and museums. The metaphorical ragpicker removes valuable messages from what has been left behind. I found that a very interesting angle to take. I decided to be strict about using second-hand materials, materials that have had a previous life, rather than going to the fabric store and buying a piece of fabric and constructing something new. That didn't interest me at all.
Shonagh: You have said that you are drawn to the dirt and the life that remains in a garment or accessory. Why do you think it's essential to show the traces of the garment's previous life in your work?
Hendrickje: I think it represents an element of timeliness, and not necessarily of origin. Instead, it tells the story of the journey of a textile garment. I find it so important not to see material as something that you use as a conclusive thing; I am a transient in the material's life just as much as the material is transient in my life. We could never see the end of each other. To acknowledge that within the construction of work is to recognize various aspects of its make, rather than just the cut or the look of the garment. These elements are the stains from the multiple uses, the labels of the so-called construction and materials used, and the stitches that come straight from the assembly line. It's like this massive, collaborative thing. The term Tenant of Culture supports this; nothing that I do is only my intervention.
Shonagh: I wanted to ask you about transparency within the supply chain, which is often not seen as valuable to a brand to share. It may devalue the product, as it would enable the curtain to fall on the myth-making merchandising and marketing phase of the garment's lifecycle. However, many organizations are calling for brands to be transparent about their supply chain. Some large brands such as H&M say they don't know who makes their clothes, and it is challenging for them to find out, but they will try. When they publish their homework, detailing how the clothes are manufactured and the fabrics sourced, it creates a false win. They have not changed their practice; they have merely shared it. What are your opinions on this?
Hendrickje: It's absurd! Isn't it? It's as if we've lowered our standards so much that we will accept a snippet of information about how it was made. H&M, the inventor of fast fashion, is incredibly guilty of this. They share information with the consumer and then say, "we're revolutionary, we've given some information online about the garment." But it's a lot grimmer than that, rather than choosing to not offshore, for example, they opt out of any real change. If anything, it gives these companies opportunities to obfuscate everything even more by virtue signaling. Giving these snippets of information under the banner of transparency, but the fact is that actually, they don't tell you anything. I don't want to become hopeless. At a certain point, you have to say this is a criminal offense to produce like this. There should be sanctions.
Shonagh: I've been doing some thinking lately about the last years of the Roman Empire before it fell. There was vast inequality in power and wealth; there was abundant greed. People often talk about today as a period of late capitalism, as if it will come to an end.
Hendrickje: There is that famous saying attributed to both Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." This opinion is also to do with that post-apocalyptic aesthetic because it is a cop-out to resort to that aesthetic. Rather than envisaging a new political and economic system, which has become almost a parody of itself now, you hope it is the actual end. I was reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher; in it, he says that this realism idea of capitalism, where people ask what else are we going to do? It is the only way of life; it might not be pretty, but what else? That this is a form of manipulation. There is a governmental responsibility within the mass production of garments. There are special economic zones that have been created; there is offshoring, the industrial-sized operation of creating garments, not in America, but China. All these things, they aren't necessarily only the producer's fault, and they are certainly not the consumer's fault. I find it so tricky to say that everyone is individually responsible for making good purchases because you open a whole different socio-economic chapter. Not everyone can make that decision at all. The accessibility to garments have been democratized , which is a good thing, at the expense of the environment, but the environmental discussion is inextricably linked and can not be detached from equality.
Shonagh: I agree that late capitalism is a misleading term; it has different meanings; the way it's used in internet culture is different from the history of the term. How ideas and trends circulate on the internet and social media is something you have looked into, specifically with your body of work Eclogues (an apology for actors), where you explored the rise in the trend for milkmaid style clothes and accessories. Why did you focus on the milkmaid?
Hendrickje: I became a bit obsessed with it as an allegorical and fashionable figure. Essentially, it's a working-class figure and very conspicuously so, because it's called the milkmaid—it's a maid—and it's a horticultural profession. But it's such a manifold character throughout history, because it has sexual connotations, has rural connotations, and has feminist connotations. I just found it too fascinating not to deep dive into its historical context. I found this super interesting book, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette, which looks at how, from the 16th century in France, the milkmaid became a phenomenon and symbol of fertility. The first one was Catherine de' Medici, who married King Henry II. She couldn't conceive, and she also was not very obedient to her husband; she had her own agenda. So the "visual merchandisers" of the court gave her this milkmaid persona because that was a virtuous figure, it was humble, it was fertile, because milk was associated with fertility, and it was obedient because it was a maid. So she started dressing up as a milkmaid. She was given this fake folly of a dairy to spend time in, a non-functional dairy that she sat in; she must’ve hated it. Here you see a history of having to appear virtuous and fertile and also a history of working-class appropriation—because it didn't do any honor to the actual milkmaid. This continues until Marie-Antoinette, who also had her faux rural village Hameau de la Reine, where she was depicted with a shepherd stick. We cyclically see this reoccur every so often; an example is in the Arts and Crafts movement where the idea of the rural, making an honest living, wearing organic materials, and being very close to nature reappears. It's always as a response to complexity within society.
I found it so funny and telling that all of a sudden, it was such a booming aesthetic again. Everyone was wearing milkmaid tops, and you could get them in every variation at each end of the market. I started to think, is this a feminist movement? Are we reclaiming this identity? Or is it quite the opposite? Is it not progressive, and what we are seeing is a very traditional idea, the recurring phenomenon of an obedient woman?
I started looking for second-hand garments that represented that for me, and I looked at how the embroidery and the materials fit within that aesthetic. I try not to say "it is the milkmaid." I somehow visually and materially represent the phenomenon's ambiguity and twofold character. I also think, essentially, a trend is interested to me if there's something slightly sinister about it. Something that isn't straightforward has to do with status and taste, which has a history of its own that is potentially problematic. However, it's so embedded within the mass culture it's been forgotten about. That is another thing that is so interesting about fashion. It has a severe case of amnesia.
Now I'm obsessed with the chore jacket—the blue worker's jacket that everyone's wearing, especially in London. It's the urban middle class that wears it, especially creatives, with no chores to complete within the context of what that jacket was intended to be used for. It has started to live a life of its own as a kind of uniform for creative people. I'm researching that now; I am at the beginning of the process. If a garment or trend has a multiplicity of historical layers, it just draws me in.
Eclogues (Series), Tenant of Culture, 2019
Shonagh: As a final question, I wanted to ask you about your utopian vision for the fashion system. Is that something you have thought about?
Hendrickje: That's a tough question. My work is so much about history and about looking backward, rather than forward. The future is not my game! I do have these fantasies about a world post mass production. A world where nothing new is produced and everything is reused. I think that is perfectly possible because there's plenty of material out there to dress everyone. In the 60s, you had this whole movement of DIY, and everyone started hand-making things. There is an agency in reconnecting with making and the origin of a commodity and going against the abstraction of labor. I think that would be something that I would love to wake up to.
Hendrickje will be in-conversation with Jeppe Ugelvig on Saturday, October 10th at 6pm at Soft Opening gallery in London. To get tickets to the event email info@softopening.london.
